The present invention relates to gift cards and, more particularly, to a gift card system which is readily operated by manual entries on various components of the system.
Over the years, businesses have issued gift certificates to customers which are then provided to other persons for redemption by the purchase of merchandise from the issuing store. In recent years, electronic gift cards have been valued by swiping of the pertinent information into a computer system from the magnetic strip and/or bar code on the gift card, and this has been particularly the case with respect to issuers with multiple store locations since the data is then available in a central file.
Partial redemption of a gift certificate or card remains a problem and various techniques have been employed in an effort to accommodate the situation of a partial redemption and to avoid the dispensing of cash representing the difference between the partial redemption and the total value of the certificate. In some instances, this has involved the issuance of a new certificate or entries entered manually on the original gift certificate or card to reflect the reduction in value.
The manual imprinting of certificates has generally required separate manual recording of information in a record book with the potential for error and use of time for double entry of the information when the sales person may have customers waiting for other transactions.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a novel manual gift card system which is simple and enables relatively rapid generation of a gift card.
It is also an object to provide such a system which uses relatively economical components.
Another object is to provide such a system which enables simple generation of a certificate reflecting the balance on the gift following partial redemption.